Annual Catch Up 2015

Just a quick update on how I'm getting on with the list, along with some mini-reviews.

37. City Lights

I'm not as fond of Chaplin as I am of Buster Keaton - I guess the latter's outlandish stunts translate much better a century later than the more measured Chaplin jokes - but this is still a delightful film. A prototypical romantic comedy, it has some lovely moments and plenty of very inventive scenes. The boxing scene, in particular, is rather amazing. The ending is a bit corny but I can't really argue too much about its high position.

49. The Gold Rush

And here's another Chaplin film. This one is a bit more of a straight comedy and the romance feels a bit tacked on, but again there are some very entertaining scenes. You've seen it all before, of course, but that shouldn't detract from the guy who did it first, and possibly even the best.

52. Hold Me While I'm Naked

Unlike two films below, this weird little film gets plus points for being very short, so you don't have time to get bored by it. It's pretty cool, actually, a kind of pastiche of film clichés with plenty of sex and overacting. Lord knows why it's as high as #52 on this list, as it's entirely disposable as far as I can tell, but I'm glad I caught it.

54. A Woman Under the Influence

Gena Rowlands is magnificent in this film, as the eccentric and misunderstood wife of the well-meaning but narrow-minded Peter Falk. It was originally intended as a stage play, and you can really tell as most of the action is confined to a few conversation-heavy set pieces. But it's handled so adeptly by the director John Cassavetes that the film has a very natural quality and it's really quite brilliant. Highly recommended.

112. Zorns Lemma

This is a "structural experimental" film from 1970 and it's a little bit strange... How do you feel about watching forty minutes of signs silently flashing past the screen in alphabetical order? Yeah, I thought so. Except, after a while you actually start to get into it. Every five or so passes through the alphabet one of the letters gets replaced by a second of footage. So you lose Z, for example, and get some breaking waves in that position for the rest of the film. It's interesting to spot the changes and see the film fragments build up to start to have some meaning. Or maybe it just hypnotises you. The ending is super boring and I doubt I'll want to watch it ever again, but I found it more watchable than a lot of the art-installation bullshit that's out there.

Oh, and Wikipedia doesn't think there should be an apostrophe in the title for some reason.

112. Le Tunnel sous le Manche

I wasn't a fan of A Trip To The Moon and this is even worse. Again, there is much to be admired about the set design, special effects and sheer ambition of the director to put this all together in 1907, but it is really dated. I suppose it doesn't help that the version I watched was extremely grainy and literally silent so it was very hard to make out what was going on. Maybe if it was restored and had some intertitles added it would be a bit more interesting, but I can't imagine I'd ever hurry to recommend it.

112. The Art of Vision
229. Dog Star Man

This is the arthouse experimental museum piece by Stan Brakhage. I'm going to tick both of these off the list, even though I technically didn't watch The Art of Vision. It's the same as Dog Star Man, but with all the segments stuck together and a couple of hours of extra footage, and there's no way I could face sitting through that. Not that Dog Star Man was bad, exactly - there are some interesting visual montages and parts of it are rather beautiful - but it's a bit tiresome. I recommend you watch a segment or two just to see what it's like, but I can't say it's worth much more than that unless you're forced to write an essay about it.